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Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Measles Vaccine Developer Warns Jewish Anti-Vaxxers

With almost no measles in the United States since the 1990s,
today’s generation of American parents are not familiar with the disease and
buy in too easily to the anti-vaccination movement currently in vogue, said
measles vaccine developer Dr. Samuel Katz.

“Unless you have worked in Sub-Saharan Africa, you have no
anxiety to protect against it,” Katz said.

The last surviving member of the team of researchers that
developed the measles vaccine 50 years ago believes it is “ludicrous,” however,
to get upset over the Center for Disease Control’s December 5 announcement that
there were 175 cases of the disease in the United States in 2013, a tripling of
the annual average.

Notably, 58 of those cases were among Hasidic Jews in the
Brooklyn’s Boro Park and Williamsburg neighborhoods. It was the largest
outbreak of measles in the US since 1996.

“It’s all so relative,” said Katz, who was honored last week
by the CDC. “True, there were 175 cases in the US so far this year, but there
are 3-4 million cases a year worldwide. In Western Europe alone there are
25,000 cases per year.”

On an average day, 430 children die of measles worldwide. In
2011, there were an estimated 158,000 measles deaths.

In a phone interview with The Times of Israel, Katz,
professor emeritus of pediatrics at Duke University, emphasized that the
measles cases in the US were all the result of the importation of the virus
from other countries.

“We can tell this by looking at the genetics of the virus.
We can even tell what country it came from,” Katz said.

“We are about to declare the Western Hemisphere measles- and
rubella-free, except for importation,” said Katz’s colleague, Dr. Louis Z.
Cooper, professor emeritus of pediatrics at Columbia University. Cooper is an
expert on the rubella vaccine and consults with the World Health Organization
on infectious diseases.

“This outbreak is a reminder that there are under-immunized
pockets, and that we are only an airplane ride away from countries where
measles hasn’t been wiped out,” he told The Times of Israel.

The CDC reported that the outbreak last spring in Hasidic
Brooklyn was caused by an intentionally unvaccinated 17-year-old who was
infected with measles after a trip to England.

Among the Brooklyn cases, 21 percent were among children too
young to have received the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. In Boro
Park, there were 28 cases, all members of three extended families who had
refused to vaccinate their children.

The primary reasons for lack of vaccination among the 30
infected in Williamsburg were refusal and delay to vaccinate.

Although there were no deaths associated with the outbreak,
Hamodia quoted a New York City Health Department spokeswoman as saying that
there had been two hospitalizations, a miscarriage, and a case of pneumonia
associated among those infected with measles.

Katz warned it could be much worse. He said that in slightly
less than 1 in 1000 cases, a child can develop encephalitis from measles, and
that during a recent outbreak in France, almost a quarter of the cases required
hospitalization.

In 2010, there was an outbreak of mumps among 1,500 Jewish
boys and young men in Brooklyn. In that case, an 11-year-old boy brought the
virus back from Britain and infected other boys at an Orthodox summer camp in
Sullivan County, New York. These boys in turn carried the disease back to their
home communities in Brooklyn.

At that time, Dr. Eli Rosen published an open letter in a
Crown Heights publication emphasizing that the illness is preventable, and
urging the community to get vaccinated.

Katz hopes parents separate information from misinformation
about vaccinations. Many attribute the high rate of measles infection in
Western Europe in part to the now-discredited report by Andrew Wakefield, a
British former doctor who was disbarred after he published a fraudulent 1998
paper in The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

“It was a temporal, not causal relationship,” Katz said
about the vaccine and autism.

Cooper asserted while it is important to keep this year’s
minor outbreak in the US in perspective, there is no reason to put children
painfully at risk for a totally preventable disease.

“In the US, we protect religious freedoms, but we end up
tying ourselves in knots. I can’t find any justification for their archaic
views,” he said of religious groups who refuse to immunize their children.
“Immunology has its own set of rules.”